By the deliberate design of many governors whose two tenures are expiring in 2019, not only have they continued to subject servants and pensioners to excruciating pains of unpaid salaries and arrears for months, contractors alike have been groaning and gnashing their teeth in distress because the governors, especially those of the All Progressives Congress (APC), are playing god by refusing to release funds to pay contractors after they have delivered on the terms of their contracts.
In what appears to be an intentional ploy to frustrate many of these contractors handling various projects for the state governments, the APC governors have made it a culture of sitting on their monies after they have cajoled the contractors to mobilise huge resources to fulfill their contractual agreements only for the governors to fail in fulfilling their own part of the bargain.
These unpaid dues run into years in most of the states, thereby causing the contractors to live a pathetic life, as many of them have their loaning banks on their trail. There are those who have gone completely bankrupt and their properties wrestled from them after they have defaulted paying back bank loans taken to execute many of these contracts.As soon as the completed projects are delivered to the governments, the governors would resort to shady tactics to frustrate the contractors.
The excuse that the state economy is unhealthy is a repeated song played to the ears of contractors by these governors year after year in spite of repeatedly making provision for the projects in their annual budgets. The lecherous among the governors would want the female contractors to satisfy their libidinous appetite before they could reluctantly pay a paltry percentage of the cost. Refusal to yield has left some victimised and sliding into penury as a result of the vindictive shenanigans of the governors.
This inhumane culture of the APC governors has gotten the attention of the newly elected APC National Chairman, Adams Oshiomole. The former Labour Union President and Edo State Governor has resolved to intervene on behalf of the owed contractors, many of whom are looked forward to, to support the party as it goes into general election. Non-payment of contractors has been cited by Oshiomole as one of the crisis rocking the party and he has sworn to see the end of it. He is not ready to chances with any of the governors so as not witness the type of Jolly Nyame ordeal. It will be recalled that refusal to pay contractors and fleecing off some of them was aggravated Nyame’s plight that eventually got him jailed.
The irony of the refusal to pay contractors is that the so-called “unhealthy” state of economy has not affected family members and close associates of these governors in any way. Their children are not only living royal and aristocratic life partying and vacationing in expensive tourist destinations around the world; they have kept on cleaning up and buying properties in choice areas in Nigeria as well as overseas. In fact, they are the only contractors who have their monies paid even before due just because they have their fathers at the helm of affairs.
